Teancum (8 page)

“Thanks, old girl,” he mumbled a farewell.
 
The beheaded clocksprung horse finally
wound down and toppled over, and Jed sat down on its flank, holding one hand
over his wound.
 
The sweat on his
forehead felt cold and clammy even though the fire in the Tabernacle rose
higher, flames exploding out the balconies and windows of the upper storeys.

Absalom and the two women found him there a minute
later.
 
They looked concerned.
 
He felt like he was seeing them through
water, slow and distorted and slightly out of their true positions.

“Thack you, Mr. Coltrade,” the Englishman said, doffing his
hat and making a slight bow.
 
“I
believe you saved our lives.”

“Eh,” Jed grunted.
 
“I’m gonna need a doctor.”

*
  
*
  
*

Poe’s machine led the way (and wasn’t there something
perfect and poetic about that, an ultra-advanced machine that was shaped like
some kind of ancient Egyptian monster, and all the human beings enslaved to
it?), bounding up plascrete corridors and tearing to shreds the Pinkertons that
got in its way.
 

That turned out to be an awful lot of Pinkertons.
 
Their deaths, by claw and fang and
sheer pounding mass of bloody-damn-hell steel, cheered Tam’s heart
considerably.
 
He still felt sick.

Poe stalked along in the Typhonian Animal’s wake, grim as
death, alternating inaudible toots on his whistle and wet, sucking coughs by
which he smeared the foul and nauseating contents of his chest on the floors
and walls of Orson Pratt’s facility.
 
Roxie stalked at his right side, a pistol in each hand (but hadn’t the
scattergun been a work of art, for the two shots it provided? and after she’d
killed one man and winged another, Tam had been more than happy to finish off
the wounded fellow with a knife to the belly), and Burton marched at his
left.
 

Tam followed in the back.
 
It gave him a good view of the carnage ahead of him, and
when he stopped to retch, belly empty and aching and lungs burning like fire,
which he did every few minutes, he could do it without being stared at.
 
Also, following at a distance let him
use his sharp ears to good effect, to hear the
creak
when a fat-eyed Pinkerton opened a door to try to
get the drop on him—

bang!—

Tam sent the man to the hell he deserved.

Or the soft squish and slap of shoe leather as men crowded
in waiting down a side passage—

bang!
 
bang!
 
snick!

and Tam added three more widows to the rosters of the
beneficiaries of the Pinkertons’ pension and insurance fund.

Abruptly, he caught up to the others.
 
They had stopped in an open area not
quite expansive enough to be a room, arguing.
 
They stood beside another lift door, with its brass and
glass panels and its accordion gate, and beside that a plascrete door labeled
STAIRS
.

“If we get onto the lift again, we trap ourselves.”
 
Burton’s voice was as hard as a punch
to the jaw.
 
“We did that before,
and played right into their hands.”

“You said no more fookin’ stairs!”

“And going up the stairs doesn’t trap us?” Roxie
demanded.
 
“Do you imagine there
are exits halfway up the tower, if we need them?”

Tam heard the
click
and
shuffle
of bootheels on the
plascrete behind him, and turned in time to plug another bloody-damn-hell
Pinkerton twice with the Model 1.

“I imagine,” Burton snarled, “that even if we find ourselves
surrounded, in the stairwell we’ll have a fighting chance.
 
No one will be able to simply cut the
rope and drop us to our deaths!”

Tam shuffled wearily to the Pinkerton and took his pistol,
shoving into his coat pocket with the others he’d taken from dead men in the
last few minutes and then sliding more brass-jacketed cartridges into Smith
& Wesson.
 
He liked the Model 1,
maybe even more than he had liked the Hushers.
 
It reloaded much easier, and sometimes, like this evening,
killing was a game of volume.

“Can he even
make it
up the stairs?” Roxie shouted, waving at Edgar Allan Poe.
 
She had a point there, Tam thought, and
besides, he was puking up his own guts—from the altitude or the injuries
or the alcohol, whichever it was he didn’t care—and the thought of
climbing the mooring tower up to the air-ships on foot didn’t appeal to him.

For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to go to
the mooring tower at all.
 
Why not
go down, get a truck, and get the hell out of Deseret?
 
Go to bloody-damn-hell California, rob
Californian banks of their queer rectangular dollars and look for the easy
life?
 
But he looked at Poe, dying
on his feet, and Burton, shot all to hell and still fighting for his precious
chubby Queen, and Roxie, who’d seduced two different men to come to the aid of
her husband (and did a woman ever look finer than when she had a pistol in each
hand and blood in her eye?), and found that he couldn’t walk away.

“Shite.”

He pressed the lift’s lever from
NO CALL
to
UP
.

No sound, no motion.

“Damn!” Roxie shouted.

“It doesn’t fookin’ matter, does it?” Tam pointed out.
 
“The lift’s dead.
 
We’re walking.”

He dragged open the plascrete door.
 
Poe nodded, wiped blood off his lips
and blew into the silent whistle.
 
With a click and a clatter of metal nails on the hard floor, the Seth
Beast pushed past Tam and crashed up the stairs.

“Come on, then,” Tam said, and he offered his shoulder to
Poe.
 

“Thanks.”
 
Poe’s
voice was a gravelly whisper.
 
Together, they limped up the stairs.

Bang!
 
Bang!

Burton and Roxie fired at enemies Tam couldn’t see before
slamming the door shut.

“You know,” Tam grunted, Poe heavy on his arm, “that
pony-dog thing’s so big, if you called it back here, I could sling you over its
shoulders and you could just
ride
up to
the top of the tower.”

Poe shook his head, spat a squirt of blood onto the floor
like bright red tobacco juice, and kept climbing.
 
“We need it to go first,” he said slowly.

Like an exclamation mark to the dying man’s words, a door
slammed at the top of the stairs and then screaming began.

“Right you are,” Tam agreed, and did his best to pick up the
pace.
 
He hurt, and hefting the
American slowed him down, but Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised any quitters.

“Here,” Burton said gruffly, “let me help.”
 
The Englishman shoved himself under
Poe’s other shoulder and together they hauled the American right off his
feet.
 
Tam still hurt like hell,
and the going was still slow.

“Brigit’s secret belly,” Tam chortled, “aren’t we a pretty
choir of angels, all of us dying and just trying to get across the finish line
before we do?”

“Speak for yourself,” Richard Burton grunted.

“But really,” Tam said, “you did promise me no more stairs.”

“Or better still,” Roxie suggested, “shut up.”

The stairs climbed back and forth in a regular Z-shaped
pattern.
 
The interior of the
stairwell was dimly lit, with a small electricks globe at each landing, but it
was enough glow to walk by.
 
It was
enough light to shoot by, too, at least for Roxie, who brought up the rear with
her two pistols.
 
Once they reached
the second landing, Tam heard the door below open and the whisper of men
plotting against them.
 

“Pinkertons,” he said softly, and before he had closed his
mouth on the end of the foul word, Roxie stood at the stair’s banister and was
firing down into the well.

She kept a steady pressure on the men behind them, and when
her pistols ran dry, Tam mutely dug two more out of his pockets and handed them
to her.

“This really isn’t my strong suit,” she observed, taking
them.

“No?” Burton sweated under their shared burden, and left a
spattered trail of his own blood on the plascrete behind him.
 
“Perhaps you can go down and offer the
gentlemen a doctored drink.”

“I thought I might seduce them,” she countered.
 
“Men are so easy that way.”
 
Bang!
 
Bang!
 
“I think it’s because of their
boundless vanity.”

The air inside the stairwell, thick and artificial to begin
with, stank acridly of fired bullets, blood, bile, phlegm and sweat.
 
It was half the reek of a hospital and
half the airborne ordure of battle.

“Is it vanity, woman?” Burton snarled.
 
“Or pride in accomplishment?
 
Men brewed beer, tamed the horse,
captured fire from heaven, built the pyramids, learned to sail the oceans,
invented writing, music, theater, dance, government and philosophy, and
discovered mathematics.
 
Maybe men
have something to say for themselves, after all.”

Roxie laughed, a light, almost frivolous sound that was
given a murderous edge to it by the gunshot punctuation she rained down on the
following Pinkertons.
 
Bang!
 
“Why,
Captain Burton,” she fluttered, “you make it sound like all those
accomplishments belonged to a single fellow!”

“A single man may accomplish many great things!” Burton
nearly shouted with the effort.
 
Tam willed him to shut his mouth and keep carrying his half of the
American but he wasn’t about to open his mouth and say anything out loud, for
fear of getting shot by the irate explorer.
 
“Think of Newton!
 
Or your own Benjamin Franklin!
 
Or Alexander the Great, by Ravana’s ten heads!”

“And what each of those men has in common,” Roxie pointed
out,
bang! bang!
, “is that a woman gave
birth to him.”

“Not without the help of another man, she didn’t!”

“True,” she agreed, “but a paltry, sad kind of help, five
minutes of sweat for which the man no doubt patted himself on the back forever
after.”

Burton growled and pushed harder up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs bright blue light flooded in
through an open door, mixed with the sounds of gunfire and angry yelling.
 
“Hold him,” Tam muttered to Burton, and
shoved Poe entirely onto the Englishman before getting a reply.
 
As much as anything else, Tam wanted a
breath of cold air that didn’t smell of plascrete and bodily fluids.
 
He shoved his head around the corner
into the cool light recklessly, though he made sure to poke out the Smith &
Wesson Model 1 at the same time.

He saw the top of the mooring tower.
 
It was a great flat space, a square,
and above each of the four corners of the platform floated one of the strange,
Viking-like air-ships, tethered by a metal pole jutting up from the tower’s
corner and inserted below the prow of the ship.
 
They were stuck to the tower by pins through their tails, as
if they were gigantic bugs in some naturalist’s collection.
 
Blue bolts of lightning ran up and down
the bits, and crackling ozone mixed into the compound stink that already
blocked Tam’s nostrils.
 
More
electricity jolted and snapped about the edges of the platform, and Tam
remembered the lightning rods he and Burton had seen climbing up the outside of
the tower. Rope ladders dangled from the hind end of each ship down the
side.
 
One of the four ladders was
anchored to a big iron mooring ring at the nearest corner of the platform, but
the others dangled free.
 
The names
of the ships were painted on the side in that Mormon gibberish-writing, just
like the name of the
Liahona
was.

Lightning flashed from the tops of all four anchor poles
towards the center of the space above the tower, like interlocked fingers or a
great bloody-damn-hell spider’s web of electricity.
 
Noticing it, Tam flinched and tightened his grip on the
Model 1.
 
You stupid bloody idjit,
he told himself.
 
As if you’re
going to shoot the lightning.
 
He
felt the hair on the back of his neck and his head both stand straight up, and
he screwed his porkpie hat on a little tighter, in a vain attempt to tamp it
back down.

In the center of the mooring platform was a plascrete shed;
Franklin Poles at its corners cast bluish light over the platform, though the
area was lit much more by the wild electricity snapping free through the air
than by the domesticated shining of the Poles.
 
Seven or eight men huddled inside the little building and fought
through its doors and windows the steel-gleaming, four-legged mock-Egyptian
apparition of death that stalked them.
 
With sticks and knives and guns they fired at it, but it was
winning—the bodies of as many men lay torn and broken on the floor, and
as Tam looked, the Seth Beast shoved its head and forequarters through a
window, shattering iron shutters into scrap and removing the head of a
screaming Pinkerton in a single bite.
 
Bullets fired by the Pinkertons streaked and sparked harmlessly off its
armored flanks.